intro

My story map: I’m sitting in my boss’ office and I say: “Lawrence, I quit.” A few years earlier, I was in Oxford UK listening to the director of my business school: “Welcome to the European School of Management. For the next 3 years you are going to be trained to become international managers and you can expect that you will be working in the largest corporations in the world, all over the world.” And 3 years later, I’m on the 15th floor of a glass building with the letters BNP PARIBAS ASSET MANAGEMENT written on the top of the building. I’m sitting in an open desk floor with phones ringing all around, people talking. And the executive offices along one side of the floor, their doors closed. My boss’ office door faces me and it’s closed. He comes out and says, how’s the presentation for Taiwan coming along? I finished it. It’s on your desk. Oh and how about the structured product project? I’m waiting to hear the feedback from Paris. He leaves, I sigh, I get up and walk to the pantry. The line is 20 people long. I get to the beginning of the line and I look at the color coded capsules: blue for Guatemala says RELAX, red for COSTA RICA says ENERGY. I pick the red one, put it in the machine, and I watch as it slowly drips into my cup. I repeat this 4 times a day for the next 4 years at the bank. One day, I open the door and walk into my boss’ office and I say “Lawrence I quit.” And he says “What? What are you going to do if you don’t work in finance?” Well I don’t know but it’s going to be creative! I’m in the East Village in a sublet apartment. To my right are rejection letters from film companies. In front of me is my laptop and on the screen it says “Oscar nominated documentary filmmaker is seeking an intern for his latest film called Paternal Instinct. The film has just been acquired by the BBC and HBO.” I meet Murray Nossel, the oscar nominated filmmaker and he tells me “you got the internship”. Three months later Murray says to me, you know, I created this company called Narativ and my business partner and I have garnered a lot of interest in our storytelling method but we haven’t really figured out how to make it into a business. Could you check out the work we’ve done and its applications? The next day, he brings me a shoe box. Filled with papers in no particular order. All the correspondences are stories and I read them all. I start to make piles, and I prepare a powerpoint presentation and I show it to him. He says, wow this is it, this is a company isn’t it? I tell him, you’re on to something and I tell him about the Monday morning meetings in the office: my boss, his back turned to the audience, asking questions and reading off of the powerpoint presentation. Not noticing that

everyone’s eyes glaze over, some are rolling their eyes, and as soon as the meeting was over, we were all in the pantry line. That was in 2005. This summer, we worked with a new Fortune 500 client from the pharmaceutical industry, helping their research and sales staff create compelling presentations, distilling 60 page powerpoint presentations into 4 minute memorable and engaging stories. And today, we’re going to give you a sense of that method, and apply it to yourself, with some practical tools you can practice today and continue to use beyond this session.